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Fashionably sustainable

As recently shared on our Danish Sustainable Events blog, this week Copenhagen is hosting Europe’s second largest Fashion Show. Sustainability has become a very critical element of fashion design and manufacturing with mainstream and haute-couture designers such as Vivienne Westwood champion better more ethical and eco practices. Next June, Copenhagen will host the Copenhagen Fashion Summit – the worlds most important meeting about sustainability and the fashion world.

While this is brilliant, if you have ever been to a Fashion Week, then you may have notices how incredibly wasteful and non-green the majority of them are. It seems that on whole the principle of sustainability need to be much better integrated into the organisation of the actual fashion shows.

To debate this question lets look to Asia and see how the Chinese approached sustainability with the Shanghai Fashion Week. For the 2011 Closing Show the organisers decided to take a bold step and work to make the event more sustainable. The attached sustainability report and video that we produced using the GRI Reporting guidelines shares their approach, their achievements and their learnings. It’s an interesting case study showing how organisers can implement sustainability into event even in areas where sustainable infrastructure, knowledge and services are limited.

I believe that turning sustainability into a “sexy” subject is definetely an important step in the right direction. And what’s the best of way of doing this but combining fashion and sustainability? Loved the presentation.